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On a more serious note; I don't know if I even care any more. I own three VIA mini-itx board. I bought them well before Atom was on the marked so there wasn't many alternatives at the time in that form factor. Funny thing is that I initially thought these boards would have awesome Linux support and didn't even bother to check. I certainly got wiser.

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...I bought them well before Atom was on the marked so there wasn't many alternatives at the time in that form factor. Funny thing is that I initially thought these boards would have awesome Linux support and didn't even bother to check. I certainly got wiser.

Me too. But initially they had basically a fairly good Linux support, and you could drive about everything with free drivers, normally these were CPU including this padlock crypto engine, chipset with storage, basic I/O, LAN, sound and even the GPU seemed to work. Well sometimes the MPEG2 acceleration seemed to be better in Linux than Windows (in terms of CPU usage) but then I can't remember which driver they were using.
xf86-video-via was at that time from Luc, later there was unichrome and finally openchrome which I use still since the others went down. Also used vesa but never the proprietary crapthing. And then the frambuffer driver from the kernel didn't really go well with the X part. Nothing that was in mesa ever really worked.
Well, besides the GPU part one can still use the boards fairly well and the GPU just for simple 2D things.

But then, as another reason:
At that time intel and AMD were driving a crazy race of MHz, wasting power and producing heat and thus noise. VIA came in with the C3 and later C7 and these small form factor low energy, passively cooled things looked like the perfect niche market. HTPC and file servers. Would have been great if VIA had given more support. Now intel is having atom and AMD has Z, C and E series covering that area with competitive power consumption, better drivers, features and stability. If this damn UVD issue wasn't there... it would be perfect.

But I keep my hardware normally as long as possible unless it really wasted power but I don't own that kind of stuff anymore. So I'll also have my C7 for quite some time I guess and maybe one day it'll be more than a text console computer with minimal X capacities.

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Quite sure. Okay, others would also have come to the market but they would've had their niche and their fanclub. The product basically would've been great, if the had better support (GPU and all related to it) and if they had sold them passively cooled from the beginning (instead they put loud cheapo fans on their Epia boards). But now in terms of power consumtion all others are quite on par and better with drivers, regardless if they're nv, intel or ati-AMD. And then from the "lower end" ARM stuff is coming, though they have the same horrible GPU problems.

But yes, they would've been the first to set their foot there and could have established a reasonable place for them in the market.